Elf and I went into the yard and sat on the rusty swing set. Elf explained the situation to me. Why doesn’t the woman just run away with her daughter? I asked Elf. She didn’t answer me. I asked again. Why doesn’t the woman just run a— Elf cut me off. It doesn’t work that way, she said. More people kill themselves in jail than attempt to escape. Would you kill me first before you killed yourself if we were in terrible danger? I asked her. Well, I don’t know, she said, it would depend on the type of danger. Would you want me to?
When my mother and her sister Tina were kids they decided to race each other on bicycles and rather than call off the race or waste time going around a massive semi truck that was blocking their path they skidded under it and came out on the other side, unscathed and laughing.
One winter evening when Elf was sixteen and I was ten she organized a political debate of party candidates. She made lecterns out of cardboard boxes festooned with party paraphernalia and used our mother’s Scrabble timer to keep our speeches under control. My father was the Conservative candidate, my mother was the Liberal candidate, Elf was the NDP candidate and I was a Communist. Although I couldn’t say I was a Communist because of my parents’ awful associations with Russia. Elf had once announced at dinnertime that she had a crush on Joe Zuken, the leader of the Communists in Winnipeg, and my mother had to Heimlich my father who began to choke to death on this news. After my mother had rescued him he said he wished she hadn’t because if Elf was planning to marry (a crush had already led to marriage) Joe Zuken then he, my father, was finished with this tawdry life. Anyway, I had to say I was an Independent. We debated the pros and cons of women’s rights and of euthanasia. Elf won, hands down. She was prepared and fervent. She had statistics to back her points and a tone that was relentlessly persuasive but always measured and respectful. She was eloquent and funny and she won.
Mind you, the judges were friends that she’d made at the music conservatory in Winnipeg and she’d paid for their efforts, secretly, with beer. She was in love with one of them, I could tell. He wore a rope belt and a paint-splattered T-shirt. He sat cross-legged and barefoot in my father’s reading chair. Elf had made sure that a sliver of her blue, lacy bra was peeking out from her V-neck sweater. He couldn’t stop looking at her, he shifted in his seat but his eyes never strayed, until my father cleared his throat loudly and said I say, sir, Your Honour in the green La-Z-Boy, are you hearing a word of what the others of us are saying?
The airplane lands. My mother and my aunt Tina are waiting. They’re standing at the bottom of the escalator, arms linked, watching me as I float down to meet them. They look like tiny twins to me, fierce, grim-faced, getting down to the business of bearing another cross. They smile at me, murmur Plautdietsch words of endearment, and then I’m in their arms, so strong. We embrace and say nothing. I don’t have a suitcase, we don’t have to wait, and we walk quickly to the car.
My mother is driving fast, as usual, but this time I don’t ask her to slow down. My aunt Tina is in the back seat staring out the window. I have one hand on my mother’s shoulder and the other slung over the back seat, holding on to Tina’s hand, so we’re a human chain. Are Mennonites a depressed people or is it just us? My aunt Tina lost Leni, her daughter, my cousin, to suicide seven years ago, three years after my father killed himself. We’ve been here before. Everything is a repeat, another take.
Nic is at the hospital. He’s on his cellphone. We wave a little and nod. Julie has shown up too. I hug her and whisper thanks in her ear and she squeezes hard. We go in by twos, no larger groups allowed. My mother and my aunt go in together. I’m talking to Will on my cell. He asks me to tell Elf something but I can’t make out what it is because he’s whispering. Will? I ask. Hang on, he says. I wait and it’s quiet on his end. Will? I can hear him crying. Just that I love her, he finally manages to say and hangs up. When they come out my mother is calm, she won’t cry now, she shrugs and shakes her head and Nic puts his arm around her shoulders and she leans into him, her head against his chest. He guides her to a chair and she sits down and stares into the middle distance, saying a few words to herself, or a prayer. I can see the marks on her arm where the dog’s teeth ripped open her skin. Two holes, like a vampire bite. Aunt Tina goes to get us coffee.
Julie and I are a team and we pull up chairs to flank my sister and we hold her hands and say nothing because we have nothing to say. There is a tube in Elf’s throat and a machine that breathes for her. We look at her and she looks at us and shrugs the way my mother did. How many words do we have left? She closes her eyes and then opens them again and pulls her hand out of mine so that she can tap her forehead. I don’t know what she means. That she’s crazy? She’s forgotten something? Her head hurts? I kiss her cheek. A Neil Young song is playing over the sound system that’s been set up here in the intensive care ward. He won’t stop searching for a heart of gold.
Elf taps her nose, draws imaginary circles around her eyes. Julie says she wants her glasses, that’s what she means. Right? Elf’s chin drops slightly, a nod. I get up and look for them. I go out of the room and ask the nurse if she has Elf’s glasses. She doesn’t. Julie volunteers to look for them, to ask Nic or my mother if they have them. She kisses Elf on the cheek, whispers something to her that makes her eyes fill with tears, maybe she says Elf, you’re the best, and leaves.
Here we are. I’m relieved that Elf wants her glasses. That there is something she wants to see. She has bright white bandages on her wrists that look like sweatbands. They’re only missing the Nike swoosh. Tubes are taped to her face. I use the edge of my shirt sleeve to wipe the tear that’s sliding down her cheek. I tell her I love her. One corner of her mouth is pulled to the side to accommodate the hose. I remember when she took breathing lessons, something called the Alexander Technique, and how I made fun of her. You have to learn how to breathe? She told me yes, there was a right way and a wrong way. She offered to teach me how to breathe properly using my diaphragm from deep within me but I lost interest quickly. She’d tried to be my piano teacher too, but that was a disaster. And to teach me Spanish. She told me how to say I have a little man when I should have said I’m a bit hungry.
I leave Emergency to find my mother and my aunt who are drinking black coffee in the cafeteria. My aunt Tina is older by a few years but otherwise they are almost the same person. They both have snow-white bobs, flashing cat eyes, a million wrinkles each and really strong grips. They’re barely five feet tall. When they see me they both call out my name and make room between them and pull me onto a chair and put their arms around me and my aunt tells me she loves me and my mother tells me she loves me and I tell them I love them too. I can barely breathe. I’m jealous of my own mother for having her sister near her at a time like this. When my father died Tina came then also to be with my mother and my sister and me, and bought each of us a dozen pairs of white cotton panties so we wouldn’t have to worry about mundane things like laundry while we were planning a funeral. When my mother had her bypass surgery Tina came then too and took me to Costco and we pushed a giant cart around an enormous warehouse buying my mother a year’s supply of ketchup and toilet paper and Vaseline Intensive Care lotion, which has recently been renamed Vaseline Intensive Rescue lotion by the company to reflect the emergency atmosphere of current life on earth. During her recovery Tina bathed her sister gently, laughing, immodest, the way I helped my sister shower when she was too weak from starving herself to do it alone. My mother a Rubenesque bundle of flesh and scars, a disciple of life, and my sister a wraith. How does one give birth to the other?